CHAPTER IX.

Blood and Death of Christ—-Blood, when applied to Christ, has a Meaning more comprehensive than its ordinary Import—-It means Totality of Expiatory Sufferings-—Christ really died—-Death reached both his Natures—-Scene at Patmos.

THERE is yet another class of scriptural passages bearing upon the question under discussion, which requires a more deliberate consideration. The efficiency of the blood of Christ in the scheme of redemption is a cardinal doctrine of the New Testament. It asserts that we are washed in his blood; that we are cleansed by his blood; that we are made white by his blood ; that we are purged by his blood; that we are redeemed by his blood; that he bought us with his blood; that without the shedding of blood there could be no remission. So the death of Christ is plainly shadowed forth in the Old Testament, and forms the absorbing theme of the New. Now it is said that blood and death could not have been predicated of the ethereal essence of the Godhead; that God is a Spirit, without blood or corporeal substan , ce ; that God is an eternal Spirit, and necessarily incapable of dying. Hence it is confidently urged that the oft-repeated scriptural declarations, concerning the blood and death of our blessed Lord must have referred to the man Christ Jesus, and not to the indwelling God. The answers, the conclusive answers to these imposing objections, may be arranged under two heads.

First. The incarnate God had blood. It was sweated forth at Gethsemane ; it was poured out on Calvary. But the Bible, in speaking of Christ’s”s blood, gives to the term a meaning vastly more comprehensive than its ordinary signification. When our Lord, the same night in which he was betrayed, after supper, took the cup, and, having given thanks, gave it to his disciples, saying, “Drink ye all of it, for this is my blood of” the New Testament;” and when his disciples, in obedience to his command, drank of the cup, they did not actually drink of the blood then flowing warm in the veins of their - Master; the sacramental fluid of which they partook6l- was the “ blood of the iNnew Testament;” that myvstical, viewless ocean of salvation provided, byv t@he whole expiatory sufferings of Christ, for “ the healing of the nations.” In thus expanding the term blood, when used to denote the blood of the Mediator between God and man, we place ourselves upon the authority of the dying declarations of the eternal Son. The expansion of the term, when applied to his own most precious blood,,, was dictated by his own unerring lips.— Matthew, 26xxvi. 27, 28. So, when the New Testament declares that the redeemed of every age and nation are “ washlied,” and “ cleansed,” and “ made white,” and “ purged” by the blood of Christ, it means not to use the term in its strict literal import, but in the same comprehensive sense in which our Saviour had himself used it at the institution of his holy eucharist.

In this vast ocean of infinite grace, opened at the dawn of time, Abel, and Enoch, and Noah, and Abraham, and Lot were regenerated and sanctified, centuries before the vital element had begun to circulate through the arteries of the infant Jesus. In this same never ebbing ocean, boundless as the love of God, will all the countless myriads of the redeemed of all times, and tongues, “and -a climes continue to be “14 washed,” and “cleansed,” and “ii made white,” and:;, “redeemed,” "until the mighty angel, standing with one foot on the sea and the other on the earth, and lifting his hand to heaven, shall swear by him that liveth forever and ever that there shall be time no longer.

Christ is said, in Scripture, to have purchased us with his blood. But how small a part did the blood actually drawn from his veins, by the sweat of Gethsemane and the irons of Calvary, formra of the infinite price which he paid! The price, the infinite price of the purchase, was the whole stupendous aggregate of his humiliation and sufferings. The first great payment was made ”when he exchanged his throne in heaven for the manger of Bethlehem. The payments were continued every day of his suffering life. From his birth to his death, he was “ a man of sorrows, and acoequaindiiited with grief.” He wander”ed” a@bout “houseless and friendless, hungry and athirst. He had not, like the foxes of the field, a hole to which he might retire; he had not, like the birds of the air, a nest wherein he might repose. He was hunted, “like a partridge in the mountains,” until he found rest in the tomb of Joseph. Gethsemane had poured its copious and tearful contribution into the treasury ”of justice, and the last installment of the mighty debt created by our sins was paid on Calvary.

By the blood of Christ, then, the Oracles of Truth mean the totality of the merits of his expiatory sufferings. This explanation solves the seeming mystery of Paul’s”s injunction, “ Feed the Church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.”—-Acts, 20xx. 28. The proposition contained in the injunction was literally correct. God the Son, in very fact, purchased the Church with his own blood, according to the sublime meaning of the term, ”as expounded by himself at his sacramental supper. The passage from Acts,. then, is clear proof that the divinity of Christ participated in his sufferings ; for had not his divinity participated, the sufferings with which he purchased his Church could not have been called the blood of God. He purchased his Church, ,not with the pains of the man alone, but with the humiliation and, agonies of the God, actual, and not merely construcuetive.” Had the man only suffered, the stupendous proposition would not have been true, that God purchased the Church “ with his own blood.” The Bible deals little in detail. By one or two trumpet notes, it is wont to awaken trains of thought sufficient to fill uninspired volumes. Had it recounted all the variegated sufferings of Christ, corporeal and mental, human and divine, we would almost be led to suppose that, literally, “even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”—-John, 21xxi. 25. From the countless group of his agonies, the Bible has selected the palpable and startling incident of hisMs shed blood—-an incident always appalling to humanity—-as one well calculated deeply to impress on the imagination,. the memory, and the hearts of men the whole most pathetic tragedy of his vicarious sufferings, divine and human, commencing when he lLeft. the right hand of his@ Father, and ending not until, from the crwoss, he cried, “It is finished,” and gave up the ghost.

Secondly. The incarnate God could die. He did die. Without his life--giving death the Bible would be a dead letter, or, rather, “ a consuming fire.” The incarnate God, in his united natures, was born of woman, as the ordinary sons of humanity are born; he died in hiMs united natures, as the ordinary sons of humanity die. If t he Godhead of Christ is an eternal spirit, so is the” Soul of an ordinary man, as to the eternity to come. The human soul is as deathless as the ethereal essence of its Creator. The soul of an ordinary man does not cease to be at his death, any more than the ethereal essence of the Son of God ceased to be when he died in his united natures. There is nothing more startling in the idea, that the second person of the Trinityv really died in his united ,,.natures, than there is in the thought that he really became incarnate and was born into our world.

But we rest our position, that the second person of the Trinity really died in his united natures, upon authority as much above the dogmas of human reason as the heavens are higher than the earth. After the resurrection of Christ, his lately crucified, but now risen and spiritualized body, accompanitied its divine occupant to his celestial home, bearing, no doubt, on its hands the print of the nails, and in its side the mark of the spear shown to the unbelieving Thomas. It was the second person of the Trinity, clothed in his now glorified vestment of flesh, who appeared to St. John when he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s”s day, commencing with the thrilling declaration, “I am the first and the last; I am he that liveth and was dead, and, behold, I am alive forever more.”—-Revelation, 1 i. 17, 18. The same divine speaker, in the leleventh verse, had declared of himself, “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last.” Who was he of whom the declaration was thus made that he had been dead? It was the same being who was alive again. And who was he that was thus alive? It was the God-man in his united natures. To give truth, then, to the divine declaration, it must have been the God-manian in his united natures, who had been dead.

Nor is this all. The glorious apparition at Patmos, in declaring that he had been dead, di “ id not intend merely to refer to the severance of the immaterial and material parts of his being. The Speaker was the Creator and the Ruler of the universe. When he said that he himself, his own, undivided, majestic self, had been dead, he did not mean to point alone to the visible extinction of his life on Calvary. He must rather have primarily intended to intimate to that beloved disciple, who had leaned on his bosom, as far as mortal ears could hear and live, those mysterious agonies, aptly termed death, which, as the incarnate substitute for sin, his divine spirit had endured from the overflowing deluge of infinite wrath. It would depreciate the majesty of the awful scene, to suppose that the divine personage meant to speak only of the severance, for three days, of his material and incorporeal natures.

The declaration at Patmos was by the God of truth. It was, as it were, his official proclamation to the universe of a stupendous event, in which he had been himself the Actor. The declaration must have been the essence of ingenuous truth; true to the letter, true to the spirit of its unlimited terms in all their amplitude; without covert meaning or misleading innuendo. How do the sanctity and the plenitude of its awful verity overwhelm that theory of man which would make the God at Patmos, notwithstanding the unqualified universality of his words, intend nothing more than that his death had consisted in the meri-e dissolution of his frail garment of humanity, leaving unimpaired and untouched his own divine beatitude!

There are other expressions, not yet the subject of comment, in this august passage, which seem to carry along with them intrinsic demonstration that the divine spirit of the redeeming, God had participated in the vicarious agonies denominated death in Scripture. Helie who spoke, and he who had been dead, and he who was alive again, was identical. The speaker applied to himself, in the three stages of his action—-the speaking, the dying, and the resuscitated stage—-the same personal pronoun. “I am he that liveth and was dead; and, behold, I am alive forever more.” If the speaker was God, it follows that he who had been dead and was alive again was also God. That he who spoke was God, is self-evident from the fact that he appropriated to himself, perhaps, the loftiest attribute of the Godhead. He styled himself “the First,” the, “Alpha.” The Alpha, then, was he who spoke, and had been dead, and was alive again. The Alpha was the speaking God, the dying God, the living God of this everliving passage. To predicate all this of the human son of the Virgin would be impiety, were it not for innocency of intention. The human son of the Virgin was created out of nothing in the reign of Herod; he was not coeval with the uncreated Ancient of Days. Instead of being the principal personage of the passage, the human son of the Virgin was not named in it, or even made the subject of allusion. He was not thus named, or even made the subject of allusion, because he was only the guise, the vestment, the human veil covering the ineffable and shrouded glories of the speaking God, the dying God, the everliving God of the first chapter of Revelation.

, But reason here interposes her speculations and her objections. She deems that the declarations of the God at Patmos, if literally understood, would * come into collision with his attributes ; that he had not capacity to suffer in his united natures ; that if he had the capacity, it was not “,fitting to God” thus to suffer; that the declarations of the God at Patmos are too high, too vast, too incomprehensible and stupendous to be entitled to full credence, according to the plain import of the terms. We would respectfully invite the authors of these suggestions to turn their eyes to the eighth and ninth verses of the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah. “ For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

The revealed “ways” and “thoughts” of God are not only beyond, but sometimes seemingly opposed to reason. To yield them implicit, credence often requires a flight of sublime faith not of-@,!pf easy attainment. Yet Abraham, the father o-0f the faithful, “staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief.” Proud philosophy might have urged that the fulfilment of the promise involved a physical impossibility. Yet the faithful Abraham “ believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness.”—-Romans, 4iv. 3, 20. Our argument asks nothing but belief in the declarations of the living God. It seeks not to sustain the doctrine that the divinity of Christ participated in - his expiatory sufferings by the frail props of human reasoning. It fixes its great doctrine on the adamantine foundation. , that , “the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”— Isaiah, 1i. 20. The doctrine developed may, indeed, be too lofty for mortal comprehension. It may be opposed to what reason deems “ fitting to God.” It may come into imagined collision with the attributes of the Deity. It should, nevertheless, be enough to convince, at least to silence unbelief, that ,the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”

Let not human reason, in the garb of the prevalent theory, affirm that, by the declaration at Patmos, “I am the first and the last; I am he that liveth and was dead; and behold I am alive for evermore,” the august Speaker meant to be understood that the man had been dead in reality, and the God dead by construction. What right has a worm of -the dust to limit -the unlimited and illimitable declaration of him whose voice was “as the sound of many waters?”

The First and the Last had indeed been wrapped in the mantle of humanity. That mantle, however, formed but the incarnate covering of the Alpha of beings. It was not the mere rending of that mantle, so gloriously restored on the third day, which constituted the death of the Alpha in the full amplitude of the awful truth announced at Patmos. The proclamation that the Alpha had been dead and was alive again, was there uttered by the First and the Last without restriction or qualification. True it was predicated of the incarnate Alpha; but it was predicated of him in both the elements which constituted his mediatorial personality. The whole undivided and indivisible incarnate Alpha, then living, and speaking, and palpable to sight, had indeed been dead, in a sense infinitely surpassing the three days severance of his material and incorporeal being. Had you, pious reader, unshackled by the domination of the prevalent theory, have stood where John stood, and fallen prostrate where John fell prostrate, and beheld what John beheld, and listened to the words which sounded in the astounded ears of the beloved disciple -would you have ventured, in that stupendous presence, to sink the majesty of the proclamation by restrictions, and qualifications, and reasoning subtleties of which the mighty Speaker seemed wholly unconscious?

It is, indeed, a Bible--taught inference that, in announcing himself the Alpha, the divine Speaker at Patmos must have referred to his Godhead. For it is recorded in scriptural history, that the redeeming man was formed out of nothing at the time of the blessed incarnation. - He was but an infant of days, and could not have been styled the Alpha of beings. The incommunicable name was limited by Inspiration itself to him who “ inhabiteth eternity.” But it is not a Bible-taught inference that, in ascribing death to himself, the divine Speaker at Patmos meant the death of his manhood alone. The declaration, in its terms, is general, reaching his entire personality and it finds no restriction or qualification elsewhere in Holy Writ. The whole letter and spirit of the Bible leave the declaration just as applicable to the redeeming God as to the redeeming man. Inspiration intimates no distinction between the divine and human natures of the incarnate Deity in the endurance of those expiatory sufferings to which Scripture has given the name of death.

We are, therefore, authorized, and in duty bound, to construe the declaration at Patmos, that the divine Speaker had been dead, according to the natural and obvious meaning of its terms, and to apply it to his whole united being. The Bible contains nothing to interdict such construction. The construction is required by the elemental rudiments of speech. It is a self-evident truism that a part is not the whole. A declaration appropriate to the whole, and to the whole only, cannot be depressed capriciously to a part, without violating the principles of sound interpretation and impugning the laws of nature. The incarnate God at Patmos ascribed death to the infinitude of his whole united being. “,I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold I -am alive for evermore.” The pronouns “I” and “He” included the God as well as the man. To subtract the divinity by arbitrary construction, and sink the declaration of death to the mere finite atom of his humanity, would be doing violence to the plain and unqualified words of the speaking Deity. It is the Bible alone that can wrest from its natural, and obvious, and plain import, the unambiguous language of the Bible. Human reason cannot do it by the despotic Word of her own power.

Nothing short of plenary scriptural proof that the divinity of Christ was constitutionally incapable of suffering, or some direct scriptural aver. ment that he in fact suffered in his manyihood alone, could limit to that manhood his unequivocal declaration at Patmos, ascribing death to his whole united being in both its natures. Had such scriptural proof or averment existed, the Bible then, acting as i“ts own interpreter, would, by its own paramount authority, have restricted within finite bounds its infinitely capacious declaration of death promulged to the beloved disciple. The contraction of the infinite to the finite, would in such case, have been by divine, not by human authority. But there is no such scriptural proof or averment. As then, the Bible has left us free to believe that the Alpha, revealed in flesh, had constitutional capacity to suffer and to die the death of expiation in both his united natures, and as he himself has assured us, if we will but receive his gracious words in their own natural, obvious, and ineffable import, that he did thus suffer and die, where is the theo<)ry, of earth, though crowned with the venerable frost of centuries, that will perseveringly continue to impeach the official proclamation of the incarnate, the suffering, the dying, the risen, the everliving God !

Let not offended reason then, cavil at our application of the term death, to the whole incarnate Alpha. In such application we but reiterate the unambiguous declaration of the First and the Last. The scriptural import of the startling term, when applied to the ethereal essence of the God clothed in humanity, will, in the progress of the ensuing chapter, become the theme of reverential and more ample inquiry. It will there, and elsewhere in our humble essay, clearly appear that the term, when predicated in Scripture of the deathless essence of the second person in the Trinity, has a meaning infinitely more lofty and profound than its ordinary secular signification.